quinta-feira, junho 26, 2008

Pashe Keqi recalls the day nearly sixty years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father's baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.

There is a political group within the Transsexual movement called "HBS" or "Harry Benjamin Syndrome".

I'll quote from the The Original HBS Site :

Harry Benjamin's Syndrome is an intersex condition developed in the early stages of pregnancy affecting the process of sexual differentiation between male and female. This happens when the brain develops as a certain sex but the rest of the body takes on the physical characteristics of the opposite sex. The difference between this and most other intersex conditions is that there is no apparent evidence until much later after the baby is born or even as late as adolescence.

This column included a rather shrill letter from a gay man who wouldn't let his name be published "for fear of the gay thought police." He was responding to a column by transsexual Nina Arsenault. Since she is well known, Ms. Arsenault really does not represent the lives of many of us who continue to struggle with an isolation that your correspondent, quite frankly, has contributed to.

Supervisor Tom Ammiano probably gave the best characterization of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a national gay rights organization that is currently on the hot seat for dropping "gender identity" from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), the Congressional gay rights bill. Said Ammiano, who is running for State Assembly this November: "HRC shouldn't be the Human Rights Cowards."

The 5th annual Trans Price March will take place Friday June 27th in Dolores Park. There will be a rally at Dolores and 19th Street starting at 3pm. Thirty different Trans and gender-variant live bands, artists and performers will be featured on stage in a spectacular pre-march show. The march itself will begin at 7 pm, circling through the Castro, down Market and back to Dolores Park for additional music and performances.

The theme of this year's march is "Marching for a Gender Inclusive ENDA", with an objective to bring a focus on transgender civil rights and to celebrate the support of the LGBT family.

This past week, I made the decision to begin identifying as male. The decision to be male-identified and start hormone therapy hasn't been a sudden one for me, but it's been building for the past several years. Anyone who has known me over the past few years is probably not particularly surprised. I'm harboring relatively few serious concerns about this transition, mostly out of awareness that I have an incredibly trans-aware and trans-identified group of friends and that my girlfriend is the most supportive person in the world. Opening this door makes me feel as though a huge weight has been lifted off my chest, and I'm very excited to be undertaking this process.

In about a week, we will once again celebrate one of our country's patriotic holidays, Independence Day, also known as the 4th of July. The other two major patriotic holidays are Memorial Day and Veterans Day, whereas Flag Day is a minor one that people seem to miss. Inevitably, on the three major patriotic holidays, LGB people have a desire to write articles about the need to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I am fully supportive of the need to repeal this stupid law. What I'm not happy about is that in these discussions and articles, transgender veterans are always left out.